Is irrlicht 1.0 more powerful than Torque 1.4?

#1 I don't believe it has any networking. Which sucks IMHO.

#2 Very basically: Graphically, yes, but for everything else no. Out of the box, anyway.

#3 Looks interesting. I will have to take a look at it.

#4 I think you want to compare irrlicht with TSE..not TGE - dont compare fixed function engines to shader engines,
its not really sensible - TSE has recently received some major rendering speedups - go check the blogs.
TGE runs very well on older fixed function hardware, making it a sensible choice for a potential wider market..
assuming you are planning to sell your game, and you dont really need all that shadery stuff - its also very
stable - as far as i know.

I personally dont think its a good idea to compare engines on polygon shunting ability - or feature lists - you
need to see how well they perform in a variety of situations - how well documented, how strong the community
is, how good support is from the engine developers, how good the tools are - how easy they are to use...
the list goes on forever..test, read, make your own decision - asking questions here will lead to biased
personal opinions..probably ;)

or you can ignore me.....i dont know any better than anyone else..i jst like to pretend i do :)

#5 Usability is key, no point in having the wow factor, if its not documented or easy(ish) to follow/understand. From an Un biased point of View, its hard to beat the Toruqe platfrom. At times I have not quite understood the GG apreach to things, but I am happy t osay for the most part they have taught me that they know what thaey are doing.

#6 You've got it right, Matt, I think.

The question you need to ask yourself is, "When I am making a game, what do I want to hack." Personally, I want to hack graphics. In both Marble Blast for the Xbox and Marble Blast Ultra for the 360, a month or two before cert...the game didn't look like it did when it shipped. It is very, very easy to hack in shaders for things. It is not easy to hack in networking.

At one point I was fiddling around with some GUI transition stuff, and I hacked Cg into TGE in less than an hour. Now it was a total, dirty hack, and I was using the Cg runtime and blah blah...but the point is that you want the foundation of your engine to be solid. Whatever you use to make your game, make sure it is solid. If you feel that Torque is solid, go for it. If you think that another engine is your weapon of choice, all the power to you.

Pick the engine you can make your game on, and make sure you remember what components really define your game.

#7 Does Irrlicht have scripting abilities? The last time I checked (which was over a year ago) you had to do everything using C++ code.

#8 @Wysardy
Why not try the Irrlicht forum and ask them since your question has nothing to do with Torque. Just my opinion though.

EDIT : Sorry, I thought this was the Torque discussion forum, but since it isn't...Nevermind :p.

#9 Wysandry irrlicht still uses c++. theres some really nice projects made with it. i think torque's best qualities are it's networking and terrain rendering in which irrlicht cant really compare. the good thing about irrlicht is that it has optional software fallback rendering so it doesnt require hardware acceleration for simple games. it also supports 2d rendering which makes irrlicht more comprehensive and "all-purpose" than torque. both engines have their advantages and disadvantages. it all depends on your particular application.

#10 Hi Okashira,

The flexibility of Torque's scripting system is another one of it's big strengths. Since this is a TGE vs. Irrlicht comparison thread, maybe the question bears some relevance here.

;)

[Edit: Oops. Just saw your edit.]

#11 After taking a closer look at their site, I've come to the same conclusion as the last time I compared Irrlicht and TGE: Irrlicht is a more feature rich graphics engine but TGE is a more powerful and complete game engine.

Irrlicht does not include sound, networking nor physics (other than basic collision detection) routines as standard. Although it's possible to add third party libraries, none of them are made specifically for use with Irrlicht or each other.

#12 I see.
Thank you for your reply.
I believe Torque is more stable.

The reason I ask this after seeing their project pages:
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=6&sid=930900346d0ea93bac957f32ec773dbd
irrlicht have scripts too. (irrLua use lua script)

and development page: (almost all are 100%)
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/development.html

Thanks
:)

#13 Irrlricht has a pretty awfull graphics pipeline, as in no unified geometry format. So despite its nice rendering features its really not all that good. YOu need to juggle 3 out of 5 or so generic formats that don't do anything well. So I'd say it has a way to go to compete with any mature game dev tool.

Having said that, in time it could be really good, and its nice to see that it also supports Mac, and there are wrappers for various languages that in some ways can make it more flexible than Torque. Just the art tools really let it down big time :(

#14 Hi all,

BTW, if we are going to create a single-player game (eg. prince of persia style)
is that "awfull graphics pipeline" more important than networking?

Thanks

#15 Hi all,

BTW, if we are going to create a single-player game (eg. prince of persia style)
is that "awfull graphics pipeline" more important than networking?

Thanks

#16 Most probably.
You don't need networking in a single-player game.

#17 A game like POP relies on a lot of complex character animation. I'm not sure how well Irrlicht handles character animating and overlapping and mixing parts of seperate animations.

you would probably have to use the my3D format to get nice static scenery with lightmaps, and .X to do character animation. And neither format is that great. .x in particular seems hit and miss as no 2 exporters seem to produce the exact same result. And My3d is static only, and is the only format that supports lightmaps and more than 1 UV channel.

#18 Are there any project page using TGE 1.4 that is working in progress?

:)

#19 First off, Irrlicht is a great "Graphics Engine", Torque is a great "Game Engine". There really is no way to compare the two engines as they are not the same.
Both are great for their purposes. These threads wanting to compare "X engine" with "Y engine" are useless unless you are comparing like engines.

#20 I Prefer Ogre over Irrlicht, If your going to build your engine with a colection of ready made libraries there are some great things to be had, that will let you make a nice engine.

Ogre has a far better developed render engine, has easy to integrate addons like Newton, ODE, Ageia, etc. Which will let you handle trimesh or convex hull collisions, raycasting, camera and mouse picks. Already has a decent Gui system in CEGUI.

If you use 3dsmax it has an outstanding art path via Ofusion, which lets you use 3dsmax as your world/level builder and uses the render engine inside 3dsmax viewports. It also has a C++ scene loader lib and scene manager, so its WYSIWYG in your game engine, complete with 6 dynamic shadow types and full support for varions pixel shader modes.

It's all really good. If your considering Irrlicht, I'd recommend looking at ogre instead. Neither are a complete engine out of the box, but with a couple of competent coders you can put together a good engine in a short time. if you pick your components wisely.